Astronaut Or Astronot: Totally Giving Away A Power Supply

Hey! It’s time for another round of Astronaut or Astronot, where we try to give away a jumbo power supply to someone on hackaday.io if they have voted in the most recent community voting round.

Before I get around to telling you who won, we need to go over the criticism of the current voting scheme. There’s a lot of valid criticism out there about how the algorithm that presents projects to the voting page is broken. Yes, it weights projects so some are seen more often than others. And yes, it can be frustrating. However, the results of the voting have no bearing on The Hackaday Prize (the space thing), and the purpose of the entire community voting is to get people looking at the projects, give away t-shirts to the project creators and 3D printers, o-scopes, and power supplies to random people who have voted. We listened to your suggestions and we’re tweaking the algorithm that presents projects for the next round of voting. That starts Monday, we’re doing the drawing on Wednesday, and votes don’t carry over from round to round.

With that out of the way, it’s time to do the whole ‘pick a random person on hackaday.io and see if they voted’ thing. For this week’s lottery, I chose five random people on the site, hoping I wouldn’t go through all of them before giving away a nice bench power supply. The first person, [in3rtial], didn’t vote. You just lost out on a really cool prize there, man.

The second person randomly selected was [tyler]. He voted a total of six times this round. I voted fifty times, but we’re not picky. That means he wins a nice power supply. Everyone go congratulate him for living somewhere that’s cheap to ship a power supply to.

That’s it for this round of Astronaut or Astronot. We’ll have a new round of voting up on Monday. For a change of pace (and because we’re going to be at DEFCON at this time next week), we’re going to do the drawing on Wednesday nevermind, we’re totally doing the drawing from DEFCON. Oh, and if you haven’t, you might want to submit a project to The Hackaday Prize. There’s still time, and your odds of winning something are really, really good.

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21 thoughts on “Astronaut Or Astronot: Totally Giving Away A Power Supply”

May be worth while to look into paying for these prizes at the winner’s local distributors may solve the shipping/import duties/sale tax surprises and most importantly offers warranty/tech support if the person needs it. Some of the rep/distributors are territorial and not offer after sales service for imports because they don’t make money.

Internet shopping is a wonderful thing and you can buy stuff without physically in the country.

Great point, and we do indeed look for this option first. But often local distributors are not willing to take foreign payment from the US and ship the item to an address in a different country. I assume this is an anti-fraud policy. In that case we end up ordering the prizes from distributors in our area and shipping them internationally.

Either way, I’m glad to get great gear in the hands of the Hackaday crowd!

That’s anti-fraud part is a matter of how the payment is done. A bank draft/money order/Swift transfer/western union payment etc could be arranged if the local dealers are afraid of a fake credit card purchase.

Then there is always cash prizes or prepaid credit card. Let the person spend it buying things.

Ticket to the next big hacker conference? A nice reflow oven? A decent ultrabook, or better yet a novena :) Even a high quality soldering station… Don’t be afraid to give away something you think most hackers will have, I bet that the recipient will either use the thing themselves or find a worthy home for it :)

Not every one get to go to space, but then again you are looking at $1000 and up for prizes (top 50) if your design isn’t duct taped together and involved a bit more than buying the arduino and jumper wires on bread boards. At least that’s the way I see it.

Wish there were a “Skill Class” divisions (sort of like boxing weight class) so that you don’t get an interesting but low skill entry beating a more boring concept but higher skills entry or vise versa.

> Wish there were a “Skill Class” divisions (sort of like boxing weight class) so that you don’t get an interesting but low skill entry beating a more boring concept but higher skills entry or vise versa.

What would the rules be for that? Seriously, make some suggestions here.

You guys set the rules, I can only make suggestions here.
If you look at the cross section of the entries of the competition. Some are beginners so they have arduinos with simple parts slapped together, some at least learn to fab their PCB with arduino and then some are just way out there. Some are brilliant, some are boring, but that’s across the classes and might not be related to skill at all.

Separate competitions at least in the qualification round so that within each group would at least get some recognization without discouraging people up front. If you want to round them all up for the final entry and let they beat each other without classes, that’s up to you.

Right now if you look at the sorted page vs skulls, you would have people that said “I couldn’t compete with that”. 400+ skulls and they got freaking laser and blink lights and are hogging your default the page views. Right now if you are not building 3D fab (laser, pick & place, milling), wireless, stuff with Arduino, blinking LED, you are SOL because that what the crowd like and you are at page 6+ and no one would bother flipping that far back.

There are some entries with lots of comments because they are easy to understand or that people can relate to that. There are also lots of entries where they get skulls and follows, but no comments at all. May be they are too tough for the crowd to understand or they are suck at page 6+. I don’t know. Sometime having comments is good feedback for the builders. May be they help solve problem or make the project more useful… You know the human side of connectivity.

You guy don’t give sufficient spot light to those project and only the one that draw the crowd. I don’t know, but if you are working on those projects, you’ll get very discouraging to see some duct tape projects and your left in the dark. You either show all of them or none of them to be fair. Spot lighting is biased.

May be judges don’t care about skulls, but they are human too. They would at least look at the amount of comments and type of comments etc. if they have to decide between two projects that have otherwise very close ranking This kind of put these projects at a disadvantage.